Right Angle began as a column in the now-defunct Sunday magazine in November 1991. The column allowed me the luxury of presenting an alternative to the prevailing left-liberal consensus in India. It has become the implicit signature tune for all my subsequent writings.

Friday, February 03, 2012

There was a curious sidelight to the furore over
Salman Rushdie’s inability to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival last month:
the overall reluctance of politicians to jump into the controversy.

Apart from Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot who
got into a mighty muddle over whether the state government had gathered the
intelligence input about the assassin sent to target Rushdie or had merely
responded to an alert from Delhi, there were few voices from the Congress
Party. Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi rarely speak on live
issues and so their silence was predictable. But the English-speaking
‘liberals’ of the party like Kapil Sibal and Salman Khurshid who are forever
willing to engage with Karan Thapar on TV were, curiously, otherwise engaged.

The primary objective of the Congress was to somehow
ensure that the anger of a section of the Muslim community at the likely
presence of Rushdie in Jaipur did not become a community grievance. At the same
time, the Congress did not want to be seen to be directing an operation that
would result in Rushdie’s exclusion. It sought to avert at all costs a Muslim
mobilisation of the kind witnessed during the campaign against Taslima Nasreen
in Kolkata. The entire operation called for duplicity, deniability and
subterfuge, attributes that were much in evidence during the course of
Operation Stop Rushdie.

Remarkably, for a party that was the real
beneficiary of Rajiv Gandhi’s decision to ban Satanic Verses in 1988, the BJP
treated this year’s Jaipur controversy quite casually. Despite the party
spokesman’s clever observation that the Government and the indignant Muslim
leaders had indulged in “match fixing” to ensure Rushdie’s voice was not heard
in Jaipur, the BJP didn’t take up the issue with any measure of seriousness. On
the contrary, individual members of its Minorities Cell were extremely
supportive of the clerics and small town publicists who saw in the Rushdie
affair an opportunity to flex their sectarian muscles.

To many of the liberals worried about the
implications of opposing a Muslim community demand, the absence of the BJP from
the battleground was both a surprise and a relief. The surprise was warranted
because the BJP rarely loses an opportunity to berate the Congress for
pandering to the most reactionary elements in the Muslim community. Indeed,
people have come to expect the BJP to be combative in its opposition to sectarian
‘minorityism’ and were surprised by the relative timidity of its approach.

The surprise was unwarranted. In 1988, when the BJP
protested against the peremptory ban on Satanic Verses, it was part of a larger
critique of secularism, or ‘pseudo-secularism’ as L.K. Advani called it.
Implicit in that engagement was the contention that the political establishment
was guilty of ‘double standards’ by pandering to Muslim vote banks. A greater
degree of even-handedness, it was implied, could be injected into the system if
organised Muslim lobbies could be neutralised by the emergence of Hindu voting
clout. In other words, secularism could be restored to its pristine purity when
the majority community could rise up and say ‘enough is enough’.

It was the disarming simplicity of a big idea that
propelled the creation of a Hindu vote bank of sorts in the election of 1991.
Although identified with the electoral fortunes of the BJP, the Hindu quotient
in electoral politics has moved in an autonomous direction. As of today, the central
idea behind it is neither the creation of a Hindu rashtra nor the decimation of
the Muslim communities but a simple desire to not be taken for granted. It is
this inherent passivity underlying the seeming activism that explains why the
Hindu vote bank has been a potential, rather than real, force. The BJP may be
the preferred party of those who vote with an eye on Hindu self-interest but it
is by no means the only party. Very often the Congress, regional parties and
even the CPI(M) in Kerala manage to get a look in.

The unique nature of political Hindu consciousness
may help to explain why the countervailing force to offset minority
sectarianism has been so sporadic. In the aftermath of the Ayodhya agitation,
the high point of Hindu activism, there have been few national issues that have
captured the imagination of the majority community. The activities of the Sri
Ram Sene in Karnataka and the Bajrang Dal may have grabbed the media headlines
on occasions and the artist M.F. Hussein may have been hounded out of India by
a determined band of Hindu activists. But these actions have rarely, if ever,
secured widespread approval of those whose politics are shaped with one eye to
Hindu interests.

For the BJP, fringe Hindu activism has actually
posed a great deal of irritation. In 1988, Hindu nationalism occupied the high
moral ground because it stood for the rights of a community whose existence and
legitimacy was being doubted and questioned by the political establishment. It
may also be recalled that one of the very first acts of the NDA Government
after assuming power in 1998 was to issue Rushdie a visa to travel to India—a
right that had been taken away from him for nearly a decade after the banning
of Satanic Verses.

In 2012, however, it was a different picture
altogether. After many of its activists dabbled in the campaign against Hussein
and the student wing of the RSS got entangled in the spirited controversy over the
exclusion of A.K. Ramanujan’s academic essay on the Ramayana from the Delhi
University history syllabus, the party has found itself bereft of legitimacy to
really stand up for Rushdie’s right of free speech. Having protested on a
number of occasion against writers and artists “hurting Hindu sentiments”, the BJP
could hardly contend that the perceived hurt of Muslim sentiments should be
ignored in the name of either free speech or artistic freedom.

It is my guess that the Congress gauged the
inability or unwillingness of the BJP to get too involved in the Rushdie
affair, more so because the issue didn’t involve Hindus as Hindus. Indeed, the
BJP was more interested in seeing whether the Congress ingratiated itself
sufficiently with the Muslim clerics or alienated itself more from a liberal
intelligentsia that has often been used as a battering ram against Hindu
nationalism.

The net effect of last month’s fuss over Rushdie is
not good for India. There is an emerging consensus that a profoundly religious
country such as India cannot afford to have an excessively generous view of
creative freedom and that the liberties enshrined in the Constitution must be
offset against prevailing perceptions of what Roger Scruton once described as
“common decencies”. In other words, if Hussein was guilty of offence, Rushdie
too must be held guilty of the same misdemeanour. The floodgates of competitive
hurt have been opened and it is likely the waters may come to submerge social
practices and lifestyles. Events such as the Jaipur Literature Festival which
have thrived on the strength of India’s relatively open society may find that
they will need to enter into political calculations before issuing letters of
invitation to writers.

This is a monumental
tragedy. In the past, it was widely believed that a combination of prosperity
and education would strengthen openness and democracy. India has suggested that
this need not be so—although it will not be the first country to demonstrate
that progress and regression also go hand in hand. At a time when the
prevailing trend is for the bar of tolerance and diversity to be progressively
raised, India is discovering a new normal based on exaggerated prickliness.

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About Me

The Right is an endangered community in India's English-language media. I happen to be one of the few to have retained a precarious toehold in the mainstream media. I intend this blog as a sounding board of ideas and concerns.
You can read the details of my education, professional experience and political inclinations on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swapan_Dasgupta).
RIGHT ANGLE is an archive of my published articles. USUAL SUSPECTS is my blog.